(Editor’s note: Flipped learning, in which students watch instructional videos for homework and use class time to practice what they’ve learned, is catching on in many schools. This is an excerpt from a new book by two pioneers of the flipped approach, titled Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Copyright 2012, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and ASCD; reprinted with permission from ISTE. The book can be purchased in the ISTE Store for $19.95, or $13.97 for ISTE members.)
When we first started making our own videos, they were not very good. Over time, our videos have gotten better. Give yourself some time and you, too, can make high-quality educational videos for your students. There are a few things we have learned which we now call our Cardinal Video Rules.
1. Keep it short. We are teaching the YouTube generation, and they want things in bite-sized pieces. If you are teaching the quadratic formula, teach just the quadratic formula. Do not teach anything else. When we first started making videos, they lasted the same length of time as our typical lectures. Most of our lectures contained multiple objectives. This is fine in a live setting, but in a video setting we have found that we need to stick to one topic per video. We try to keep our videos under 15 minutes and really shoot for under 10 minutes. Our mantra here: One topic equals one video.…Read More